Page 68 of The Treasure House

“Seriously? You’re such a snitch, Uncle Jake.”

“Jesus, Flo, I’m so sorry,” Jake apologized, once Lainey had dragged herself off to his truck, complaining the whole way. He was all kinds of embarrassed, and pretty mad.

“It’s okay, Jake, I’m not actually her bitch,” Flo said. She seemed vaguely amused.

“Well, sorry a thousand times over and… just more sorry. I’ll definitely be telling her mom. And Liv’s a hardass, so Lainey will know about it.”

“You seem to be taking that little witch in stride,” I said suspiciously as we walked to the car. Across the parking lot I could see Jake telling his niece off.

“I’m playing the long game.” Flo opened the car door. “Burgers?”

“Leftovers.”

“Even after someone called me a b-word?”

“Even then.”

“And Jake thinks Lainey’s mom is a hardass.”

“Language!”

She rolled her eyes again, turned on the sound system and queued up Spotify.

Sixteen

Flo and I slogged through evenings and weekends of sorting through treasure and trash. We had a few fun moments going through bags of cheap plastic toys. There was one bag full of little colored balls with holes in one end and plastic protrusions at the other. We didn’t know what they were at first and had to google them—original 1950s “pop beads.” You could pop them together to make jewelry.

“It’s pretty nasty jewelry,” Flo said, after she’d made a dozen or so bracelets and covered her wrists in them. “Although on Etsy people are selling bracelets like this with vintage beads for five dollars, so they’re not total garbage.”

When we went into the café the next morning and Colleen saw them around Flo’s wrists, she just about melted.

“Oh lord, I had those when I was little!” She bent over Flo’s stack of plastic beads. “My sister and I used to sit for hours popping them together. I had a set that was supposed to look like ‘genuine pearls,’ and actually they kind of did. I wore that necklace on my first day of high school and didn’t I look fine.”

“You can have some if you want,” Flo volunteered. “We have way more than we need.” She unpopped her bracelets and offered them to Colleen. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Mom?”

“Of course.” The glow on Colleen’s face as she took the junky little plastic beads made me smile.

“Coffee is on the house today, then,” Colleen said, and when she served us those pop beads were snug on her wrists, blazingly bright against her skin.

It turned out there was a lot of valuable culch in our house—or usable culch as Flo would say. Some things were worth money and some things weren’t, but even the stuff that didn’t have cash value had other kinds of value. Roger had grown teary at the sight of a battered old cookie tin. It was bright chartreuse, with brown and orange mushrooms all over it. It was very dented, but the colors were probably as bright as they were on the day it was bought. Roger had barely been able to speak as he put his hands on it.

“Are you okay?” Flo had asked, alarmed.

Roger nodded, but when he met my gaze, he was in tears. He pressed his lips together and tried to find his voice. “My mother had this canister,” he said, his voice stretched. “It used to sit on the top of the refrigerator, where we couldn’t reach it. When we were allowed a treat, she’d pull it down and pop the lid.” He was losing his battle with the tears. “Only the store-bought biscuits went in this tin.” Roger’s smile was wobbly. “For her, store-bought was the best.”

We sent him home with the tin, and he cradled it the whole way down the street. The next time I was at his house, I saw it sitting in pride of place on top of the refrigerator.

Slowly, we were making headway. We sold most of the records to Sammy from Vintage Vinyl & More in Camden, and Alan was helping me list the old furniture we didn’t want to keep online.

“You have some absolute gems here,” Alan told me as we went through it all out on the lawn. Jake had rigged up a couple of floodlights in the tent so we could sort things after work, now that it was dark early.

I photographed the “pieces,” as Alan called them, and he wrote up the descriptions and measurements. We had a deal that he could have first bid on anything he saw that he liked. Luckily for me, he liked a lot. He took an old church pew and a couple of bentwood rocking chairs, and a whole bunch of lamps. The mid-century furniture sold easily online, the older stuff less so. I got an eye-watering amount of money for an old fifties teak bed that was, as Flo would say, in mint condition. There was a kidney-shaped rosewood writing table that Alan had high hopes for. He turned down several generous offers, even though I almost died each time he did.

“This is antique English rosewood, Zoe,” Alan told me, looking horrified at my instinct to accept the first offer. “Ounce by ounce, this wood is worth more than gold!”

“You should be an antique dealer,” I told him when I had a wad of cash in my hand and the rosewood table was driving off in the back of a van.

“I used to be one,” Alan said, looking a touch smug. “But I’m retired now.”